My work is rooted in Newfoundland and Labrador — in its coastlines, its fishing communities, and my own family’s history within them. Growing up with an ancestral connection to the ocean and the fishery, I became attuned to a particular kind of architecture: the stages, stores, and flakes built directly from necessity, shaped by the rhythms of catching, processing, and preserving cod. These structures are not incidental to the landscape — they are expressions of it, built against and upon rock of extraordinary age and origin.

Newfoundland carries the geological memory of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent, in formations that were once part of another world entirely before drifting to become this shore. Nowhere else on Earth are such ancient and varied geological sequences so openly exposed — folded, fractured, and coloured in ochres, greens, and greys, shaped into forms that feel both alien and deeply familiar. This exposed geology is not backdrop but presence, an aesthetic force that runs through the landscape with the same insistence as the sea. Against this deep time, the collapse of a fishery and the disappearance of a vernacular architecture register as urgent, immediate losses — a single human lifetime measured against hundreds of millions of years of stone.

Working with fish skin leather, I discovered a material practice that mirrors this larger inquiry: a way of transforming remnant into meaning, of keeping an embodied record of a culture and an ecology in the midst of profound loss. The inspiration is personal, but the questions it raises — about disappearance, about memory, about what we make from what is left — reach far beyond any single shoreline.